Death of a Ghost. Charles Butler

       One

      IT WAS A hot day in August and Jack Purdey was taking the lanes too fast. Jack always drove like that, but today it was worse because the lanes were narrower and he was nervous about Lychfont. Untrimmed hedges flicked the wing mirror and strips of yellow hit the windscreen as a tractor flung back straw. Watching from the passenger seat, Ossian saw his father’s profile turn hooked and mean, like a bird of prey in mid-swoop.

      Will I have ear hairs when I’m fifty? Ossian wondered. He said nothing, but at each corner braced his foot against the floor.

      Jack saw this at last and pointed out in his hurt voice: “We’ll be late if I don’t put a spurt on.”

      “We’ll probably be late if you do, Dad. Kaput. Worm-food.”

      “Huh. Morbid child. We want to make a good impression, you know.”

      A milk tanker pulled out from a gate at this moment and forced them to the edge of a ditch. Jack swore inventively, but he drove with greater caution after that.

      All this for Catherine Frazer! thought Ossian. She won’t even notice.

      Ossian tried to distract himself by reading the book his girlfriend Lizzy had given him. It was a hardback novel with 300 pages of close-set print: Death of a Mayfly. Lizzy had slipped it into his hand at Philadelphia International, just before the departure lounge. “For the trip. It’s the latest Inspector Gordius.”

      Nice thought, reflected Ossian. He’d felt bad because he’d bought her nothing in return. Not that she’d seemed to mind.

      “Just don’t forget me, will you?” she had told him.

      The small print made him queasy though, and the plot – some double-cross, triple-bluff mystery about a spy on the run – was too complicated to read in the car. But the message she had stuck in the flyleaf was sweet. “To my Ill-made Knight. From Your Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Typical Lizzy, quoting poetry at him. He could see her nose wrinkling as she wrote that.

      “There’s a speed limit in this country!”

      “Sorry,” said Jack. “For a moment I forgot which side of the road I was meant to be on.”

      Ossian checked his seat belt for the hundredth time and thought again of Lizzy, back in Philadelphia.

      Maybe that quote was just a way of trying to confuse him. Lizzy loved the idea of being beyond his comprehension, a wild and mysterious muse, even if she did have freckles. “You’ll never understand me,” she would say wistfully. She had talked like that a lot in the week up to his leaving. “And I’ll miss you so much, Ossian. Why do you have to follow your dad back to Britain anyway? Just because his residency’s ended. Anyone would think he owned you.”

      “Got no choice, Lizzy. I’m only sixteen, remember. A child in the eyes of the law.”

      “Not from where I’m standing,” smirked Lizzy and wrapped her arms around him.

      Stretched out in his car seat, Ossian remembered just how good that had felt. He let Lizzy’s hands run down his body once again – then caught an accidental glimpse of his face in the sun-visor mirror. A young man’s face, he assured himself. Not a child’s at all.

      More than once he had suggested Lizzy should come to England too. Or come in a year once her course was over and he was settled, and they would move in together and he’d get a job somehow.

      “You really think I’d leave this? It’s my home!” she had said, gesturing to a landscape of river, tower and sky.

      “You could come back to visit,” he said, “whenever you wanted.”

      “That wouldn’t be the same. Like I said—”

      “I’ll never understand you!”

      “Something like that, errant boy,” said Lizzy with a sigh.

      Ossian wanted to find her sigh mysterious, if only to oblige her, but those freckles stood in his way. In any case, Lizzy was better than mysterious: she was truthful and kind, and she didn’t think of him as a famous artist’s son first. And she was fit! Yes, he would miss her badly.

      The sun was high now and he pushed the sun visor back. There, ahead of him on a ridge of low hill, was the Corn Stone. Ossian had contrived to forget all about it, but it started a domino trail of memories – Lychfont memories, of which this stone was the first. The Corn Stone had been a sacred place once. Many years ago – seven, was it? – he and Colin Frazer had made small but bloody sacrifices there. Little yobs! No vole or shrew had been safe. But now the Stone looked disappointingly mellow, a little pearl button sewn on to the corduroy fields. To Ossian’s eye, grown accustomed to life on an American scale, it was as flat as a tiddlywink.

      Travel broadens the mind, he reflected, the way a rolling pin broadens pastry. It had certainly flattened Hampshire. What could Lychfont offer when you’d seen Niagara and the Grand Canyon? Some pleasant ripples of green hill – a ruin or two? A distant prospect of Southampton docks? Perhaps he could have found a way to stay with Lizzy if he’d wanted to. If he’d really tried.

      “We should be there by now,” said Jack. “I wonder if I’ve overshot the road? Easily done.”

      “No, Dad – we’ll get to Marlow’ Farm in a moment. Then it’s less than a mile.”